This paper presents the physical design and electricalcharacterization results applied to the ip-core of a single precisionfloating point unit (FPU), which follows the IEEE-754 standardfor the representation of binary real numbers. An RS-232 serialinterface was implemented for the communication between theFPU and a computer for test purposes. Functional tests wereperformed for several operating frequencies, verifying the resultsprocessed by the FPU. The power consumption was also recordedand compared with consumption estimated by the synthesis tools.Tests included addition, subtraction, multiplication and divisionoperations, using different baud rates between the interface andthe FPU.